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Approved (limited) – Human form and contact in Travel

Little quiz for everyone – picture below has been marked based on Google Policy Approved (Limited)Human form and contact - current bullet point 6 (the last one). Is this correct?

Approved (Limited) – Skin Exposure?

The policy states:

“Image ads showing tight clothing or exposed skin in areas including, but not limited to, midriff, thighs, and shoulders will be marked “Approved (limited).” Affected ads include ones that show real people or cartoons/animations with exposed skin or tight clothing that give an indication of breasts, buttocks, or genitalia, and ads in which adult human forms are in bodily contact. These ads won’t show on certain Display Network sites if publishers opt out of showing such ads.”

These especially words: “areas including, but not limited to”, create situation in which if Google wants Google can put any image ad with human being into this category. At this point publishers, bloggers may consider it “dangerous” and not allow to publish on their blogs. If you run religious portal about pilgrimage, you may not like kissing people in swimsuits on your website. Of course, you do not want to give space to any explicit content but… would you object to an ad like this? If you’re a regular travel blogger your approach might be the same. You do not want to have “sexually suggestive” content, but you want some money. After all you’re writing about Hawaii travel adverts on your blog.

Another view is that someone simply does not want some smiling people with open mouth, and white teeth on their website (fair enough) and I can also understand this but at this point Google’s own policy is a bit of a sham. The policy effectively classifies my guy on a bike as “sexually explicit” by putting him into one category with “Affected ads include ones that show… exposed skin or tight clothing that give an indication of breasts, buttocks, or genitalia”.

Is my guy offending anyone? Perhaps yes, but should he be in this same category as picture of tight clothing that exposes genitalia? Not that I can guarantee his jaw-drop is not a naked photographer and his hands are not on the handles of a bicycle but somewhere else but this I will leave to your imagination. Drilling this further you can arrive with another thought – maybe in this case Google tries to “Approve (Limit)” our imagination 0-(*)!?

Oh, Google if you create rules make sure they are precise as now we have a clear indication that you can moderate not only your natural algorithm, but limit advertising of companies by placing their ads into statuses that are not necessary clear to explain.

Of course what can you do when you’re up against mighty Google – we allow a company to expand to the size where only some anti-corporate regulation could break it up into pieces that would stop them effectively creating their own ineffective and sometimes very poor focused on revenues “laws”.

Let’s not forget travel industry itself which uses a lot of human bodies in their advertising. It is the industry that contributes plenty of money to Google’s revenue. We also know Google is after this market with their attempts to introduce flight search and other vertical travel searches. Is this one of the steps to take a bite from Expedia-like companies? Or they were threatened with legal action by religious groups?

For some reason, we do not believe they are afraid of excommunication after 15 years of ”Don’t be evil” policy .

Let us know if you have more interesting info or pictures of undeserved statuses. Also if, you’re publisher within the Google Display Network you can shed some light on this from your perspective?